Number of community gardaí in north inner-city has fallen by 80% in a decade

On 7 December, in a community centre off Dorset Street, representatives of residents of seven neighbourhoods in the north inner-city spoke of their frustrations at the lack of gardaí on the beat in the area.

Since a child was stabbed outside Gaelscoil Choláiste Mhuire on Parnell Square East, and riots in the aftermath, there have been more gardaí on O’Connell Street, they said. But they are still rarely spotted in other areas.

“These areas have been abandoned,” said Tony Kelly, chairman of the District 7 Community Alliance, an umbrella group for seven residents groups.

The north inner-city is one of three areas in Ireland piloting local community safety partnerships, a more holistic way of making neighbourhoods safer.

But Labour Senator Marie Sherlock said at the 7 December meeting that the number of community gardaí assigned to Dublin North Central which covers an area including the north inner city has plummeted in the last 10 years.

Sherlock pointed to government statistics that show that in 2013 there were 152 community gardaí assigned to Dublin North Central. By October this year, that had shrunk to 29.

“While there is a lot of lip service given to community policing,” says Sherlock, “on-the-ground management decisions and staff allocations do not reflect a commitment to community policing”.

In response, a spokesperson for An Garda Síochána says: “All frontline Gardaí perform community policing duties.”

“Community policing is one of many competing priority areas for An Garda Síochána,” he said.

Fitzgibbon Street Station was reopened in 2022 and was designed to be a community policing centre, he said.

By then, the number of community gardaí had fallen from that high of 152 in 2013 to 40. From there, it has continued to fall.

What is community policing?

Ian D. Marder, assistant professor in criminology at Maynooth University, says that it can be difficult at times to define community policing.

Broadly, it is an approach “where the police invest time in proactively building relationships with and among people to develop a whole-of-society approach to making us safer and healthier”, says Marder.

Gardaí engaging in sports and other recreational, educational, or health-based activities with groups of young people in disadvantaged areas is an example of the approach in action, he says.

The idea is that the whole of society works together to create safer communities.

In November 2022, Minister for Justice Helen McEntee, a Fine Gael TD, promised to roll out new teams of dedicated community gardaí “to help build stronger, safer communities and tackle anti-social behaviour” by the end of 2023.

The plan was to cut the country up into “community policing areas”, each with a dedicated community garda assigned to it, according to a press statement on the Fine Gael website.

The Department of Justice didn’t respond in time for publication to queries sent Thursday as to whether the rollout of community Gardaí policing teams is proceeding.

Marder, at Maynooth, says that “community policing is most needed in places that have the most instability”.

Rhetoric and reality

In many parts of Dublin, the number of community gardaí has stayed relatively stable over the last decade.

For example, in the Dublin South division, which stretches south-west from Rathmines and Drimnagh out to and including Tallaght, in 2013 there were 53 community Gardaí and in October this year there were 47.

In the Dublin South Central division, which covers a strip from Bluebell east through the south inner-city to the Docklands on the south side of the river, as well as Sandymount, Donnybrook and Ballsbridge, in 2013 there were 58 and in October, 53.

A Garda spokesperson didn’t directly answer questions as to why the number of community gardaí in Dublin North Central has dropped so much.

Under Operation Citizen, 36 full-time gardaí are assigned to Dublin North Central, he said, and all Gardaí use community policing approaches in their work.

“Community Garda simply refers to those who are exclusively assigned to building relationships with local communities and civil society including giving talks to schools, community groups and others,” said the spokesperson.

Fitzgibbon Street Station was designed to facilitate community policing, he said. “At the core of every step of the design process, was the need to create a centre of community policing.”

Sherlock, the Labour senator, says a change of approach by senior management appears to be at play. “When Pat Leahy was the assistant commissioner [for the Dublin Metropolitan Region] there was a huge push on community policing, but that has fallen away completely.”

The reality on the ground doesn’t match the narrative, says Sherlock. Community gardaí feel frustrated, she says. “They feel really passionate about their job but they feel really stretched.”

The planned rollout of community policing areas arose from the Commission on the Future of Policing, says Marder, the criminologist at Maynooth.

But it is common for police services to say they are committed to community policing, and fail to invest sufficiently in it, he says.

“The concept is usually as much about legitimising policing as it is an operational reality,” says Marder. “If you claim to be prioritising community policing that looks good as a narrative, but it has proven very difficult for police organisations to prioritise it in practice.”

“Police forces, not just the guards, are so embedded in a reactive, incident-focussed, firefighting model of policing,” he says. “That leaves few resources left for proactive problem solving and relationship building.”

In areas with high social instability, resources intended for community policing may end up being diverted to firefighting approaches more often, he says.

“But if you only ever put out the fires and don’t fireproof anything, then there are always going to be a lot of fires that could have been prevented,” Marder says.